unsweetened peonies

In a previous entry, Chad Parmenter's comment introduced the idea of a possible relationship between ellipticism and parataxis—something I started thinking about and now have followed a little further. While ellipsis and parataxis are different (but not opposite) types of grammatical constuction, it's true that many contemporary poems are characterized by paratactic constructions and that, therefore, the "space" left by the disconnected sentences, phrases or fragments is elliptical, that is, to be filled in by the reader. Generally, a heavily paratactic poem signals its modernity. The opposite of parataxis, hypotaxis, is more often seen in older poems. A poem by Jane Kenyon, for example, already seems dated due to its reliance on hypotactic constructions (among other things, including its predictable movement toward the epiphany):

Peonies at Dusk

White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.

Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They're staggered
by their own luxuriance: I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.

The moist air intensifies their scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what it's coming from.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one's face.

The poem is immediately "updated" when parataxis replaces hypotaxis, fragments replace full sentences and juxtaposition is introduced:

Peonies at Dusk

White peonies bloom, send out light.
The rest of the yard grows dim.

Outrageous flowers! Big as human
heads. Staggered by their own

luxuriance: I had to prop them up
with stakes, twine.

The moist air intensifies. Their scent.
The moon moves around the barn

to find out what it's coming from
in the darkening June evening.

I draw a blossom near, bend close, search it.
A woman searching a loved one's face.


Many older (or not so older) readers of contemporary poetry are put off by the contemporary poem's parataxis and resultant syntactical shifts, just as they find cinematic jumps unpleasant rather than exciting. Because a poem no longer has a recognizable stylistic façade, the reader may find it impossible to enter—where's the door? A poem's subject matter is less of a readability problem for some than the (defeated) expectation of familiar syntax.

Further updating occurs when Kenyon's poem is rearranged toward an "eastern" rather than "western" ending (these are terms I first heard from April Ossman at a Colrain conference). Briefly, the western ending is one that ends the poem with a swelling wave of music and a clash of cymbals; the eastern ending is a chime struck once that reverberates throughout the landscape. The original, western ending:

Peonies at Dusk

White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.

Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They're staggered
by their own luxuriance: I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.

The moist air intensifies their scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what it's coming from.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one's face.

As experienced poets know, the extreme westernization of a poem's ending can often be alleviated by a simple swapping of stanzas:

Peonies at Dusk

Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They're staggered
by their own luxuriance: I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.

The moist air intensifies their scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what it's coming from.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one's face.

White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.

So the poem ends with a whimper, not a bang, and has a more contemporary feel. Now, with a paratactical syntax, and relineation into couplets (another contemporary trend):

Peonies at Dusk

Outrageous flowers! Big as human
heads. Staggered by their own

luxuriance. I had to prop them up
with stakes, twine. The moist air

intensifies their scent. The moon moves
around the barn to find out what

it's coming from. In the darkening
June evening I draw a blossom near,

bend close. Search it. A woman
searching a loved one's face.

White peonies bloom, send out light.
The rest of the yard grows dim.

Now the debate over author intentionality, the meaning of meaning and all such like concerns begins--the concern of translators is also the concern of any reader of a literary text--how to balance the stylistic or "surface" with the intended (and unintended) authorial purpose(s). Many poets use surface manipulation to achieve terrific, often unexpected, results. The idea of poetic development, as it applies to some inner, psychological (or spiritual) evolution (and hard-won "truths") seems also a somewhat outmoded, heavily romanticised concept of the Poet. After all, Khalil Gibran (my favorite "poet" in high school!) or Rumi or good old Babba Ram Dass (sure wish he could be here now) and others of the high-minded supercharged spiritual school of poetry certainly have reached some heights (or depths) of inner development--but what have they got to show for it in re: to the actual writing? Obviously, no connection, and never has been one, between personal goodness, suffering, enlightenment and whatnot and great writing. I remember this conundrum well from my hippified youth--guru-worship vs. the drek of the guru's actual writing--swing low, sweet platitude.

The play's the thing

While Ellipticism has been applied to a poetic style or school, it seems to me that the idea of what's missing, and how that perpetrates the creative act (both in composition and interpretation), is everywhere. In a restaurant, overhearing only bits of a conversation and filling in the rest; in a face to face conversation where gesture and facial expression fill in the unspoken text, perhaps with contradictions to, or support for, the actual words spoken; at the movies, where cinematic jump cuts and flashbacks elide the linearity of a plot; or through background music that supports, denies, or introduces an entirely other world--all add another dimension to the spoken word. This is also true in drama (and maybe a better comparison than film, since dialogue in drama is of utmost importance) where playwrights get to use all the surrounding apparatus of dialogue (action, gesture, prop, music, costume,
scenery) to emphasize, confound, or subvert the spoken word. Having begun my writing life writing plays, not poems, I am always interested in the correspondences between and among these two forms, especially in re: to the idea of "meaning." In theater, the concept of the fourth wall is a great one to apply to the poem wherein the reader can “peer into” the world of the poem with the sense of overhearing something meant to be private. Just as in a play, where the audience is not overtly included (except occasionally, by design), but whose presence is crucial to the creator, a poem needs to be "looked at" in order to exist at all. For the playwright, as for the poet, the audience determines effect. When Arthur Miller built a small cabin in the woods in order to write in isolation the play that was hounding him (Death of a Salesman) he still had no idea that this play that had a hold on him would have a hold on an audience. On opening night, as he stood in the back of the theater and watched the curtain come down in complete silence, then stood for a moment as no one moved or spoke he thought: "It's a failure" until, as the story goes, someone remembered to applaud and "the whole house came down."

In a recent New Yorker article (Dec.23, 2007), John Lahr quotes Harold Pinter: "I think there’s a shared common ground [among people] all right, but that it’s more like quicksand." Pinter's plays, of course, depend on the elliptical moments, those pauses fraught with multiple meaning, looks and intonations, all the missing words among the characters and what's not said is most powerful. Perhaps such power is hard to achieve on the page--certainly the poetic "leap" that Bly proposed as existing and reproducible is one way to put the fraught back into the pause for a poet. Unfortunately, many contemporary poets have only the empty pause--much like the dreaded "dead air" on a radio program--to show for their elliptical efforts.

By the way, I wonder what ever happened to "verse drama"--is there anything in contemporary poetry that would fit that description? Maybe Gluck’s Meadowlands? I think the Poetry Foundation is trying to revive the form with an award for such.

Deeper into January

Along with the contemporary poem's romance with ellipsis and various indeterminacies comes a weird relativism; that is, a sense that the poem can be re-arranged in many different ways to achieve different, and sometimes better, results than the ones in the author's own version. This raises the question of inevitability--is the final, perhaps even published, poem the best poem it can be, or is it simply where the author stopped revising it? It also raises the issue of author intention: where is the border, if there is one, between the author's intended "meaning" and the reader's perceived "meaning?" Does the author's intention matter in the reading of a poem? Should it? Or (as I believe), should the poem trump the poet? Often the poem is better than the poet allows it to be, or enables it to be. Here is the original, relatively straightforward, poem:

In January

Ted Kooser

Only one cell in the frozen hive of night
is lit, or so it seems to us:
this Vietnamese café, with its oily light,
its odors whose colorful shapes are like flowers.
Laughter and talking, the tick of chopsticks.
Beyond the glass, the wintry city
creaks like an ancient wooden bridge.
A great wind rushes under all of us.
The bigger the window, the more it trembles.


Here is another version with no other changes but in line order:

In January

This Vietnamese café, with its oily light,
its odors whose colorful shapes are like flowers
is lit, or so it seems to us:
only one cell in the frozen hive of night.
A great wind rushes under all of us.
The bigger the window, the more it trembles.
Laughter and talking, the tick of chopsticks.
Beyond the glass, the wintry city
creaks like an ancient wooden bridge.

In this version, the poem starts inside the café and moves outward to the city as a whole. It hangs together because each line has a wholeness of its own but is not linked by necessity of narration to its immediately preceding or succeeding line. The gaps, or ellipsis, between and among lines, allows movement of them to other positions, and produces a different frisson. While the opening line of Kooser's original poem is superior to this opening—it is a more striking image, while this opening is simply good description—the ending of this version strikes me as better. The last line, while arguably too big (a "western" ending which I'll discuss in another entry), is less faux-epigrammatic (the "bigger the window" etc., echoes "the bigger they come, the harder they fall" and ending on that line calls attention to the clever, but empty, echo—empty because while the literal part of the line may be true, a bigger window trembles more in the wind, its epigrammatic echo has no real resonance in this poem). Also, compared with the author’s original version, this version seems more mysterious, less linear and, to my mind, more interesting in its progression for those reasons. It’s also a bit darker, less cozy, more about the menace outside, the unpredictable nature of weather, winter, and the bridge out of the city is not safe, is one that creaks. It is, in fact, ancient. This ending is not as pat as the ending in the author’s version.

Here is a third version:

In January

A great wind rushes under all of us.
The bigger the window, the more it trembles.
Beyond the glass, the wintry city
creaks like an ancient wooden bridge.
Laughter and talking, the tick of chopsticks.
This Vietnamese café, with its oily light,
its odors whose colorful shapes are like flowers
is lit, or so it seems to us:
only one cell in the frozen hive of night.

Many poems can be upended to good effect. This seems surprising, but if you think about it, poets write toward the epiphany, the big idea, the emotional high, and that very progress is itself a cliché no matter how well or originally it's written. That's because we expect the wind-up before the pitch in every kind of discourse, not just poetry. It's how the mind works and so we echo that working in writing. One way to lessen the predictability of this kind of writing is to "delay cognition" through a simple grammatical strategy like prolonging a clause, or not stating the agent/subject immediately. In this version of Kooser's poem, the big ending lines are first, so now the poem becomes an exploration of that mighty conclusion, something like the cinematic flashback, and the emotional center shifts from the menace outside, the indifference of nature, to the small but enduring grace of human company, giving the poem another kind of feeling, less dark. The line about the "one cell" now has a very different resonance as the poem moves toward, not away from it--and the "hive" speaks of human contact, the sense of huddling together in "one cell" more than alienation in the bigness of a winter night, an indifferent universe.

Looking at all three versions, it seems to me that the author's own version is the weakest of the lot, but could be improved greatly by cutting the line "the bigger the window" altogether, and re-arranging the lines once again:


In January

Only one cell in the frozen hive of night
is lit, or so it seems to us:
this Vietnamese café, with its oily light,
its odors whose colorful shapes are like flowers.
Laughter and talking, the tick of chopsticks.
A great wind rushes under all of us.
Beyond the glass, the wintry city
creaks like an ancient wooden bridge.


A poem is on a continuum of creation. The poet chooses when to stop. Sometimes the poet doesn't know best, but the poem does. The poet needs to listen to the poem.